1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for formatting a document including both figure data and text data.
2. Description of the Background Art
In a document formatting apparatus, a document represented by document data, including text data and figure data, is formatted appropriately into a specified format according to region data specifying regions at which the document data are to be laid out. In this formatting operation, highly sophisticated knowledge data are necessary in order to achieve the most suitable layout, with appropriate consideration for various aspects such as an amount of data to be laid out, semantic relationships among the data, and an overall balance of each page.
However, in a conventional document formatting apparatus, sufficiently sophisticated knowledge data have been missing, so that determination of the arrangement of the data and margins have depended largely on empirically acquired skills or the patience of an experienced operator.
Conventional document formatting system determines the arrangement of the data automatically by utilizing the referential relationships between the text data and the figure data, but the arrangement obtainable in such a system is inflexible, and ignores any preference of the operator and an overall balance.
In such a conventional document formatting apparatus, if a manual operation type, all the arrangement of data and margins have to be specified manually, so that the amount of operations required becomes enormous, and efficiency is very low. If it is an automatic operation type, the preference of the operator and overall balance are completely ignored, so that tedious post-processing manual correction and modification operations are indispensable, and, as a result, the efficiency is also very low.